The ‘defund the police’ and BLM rhetoric that thrilled in 2020 has become a political albatross.
The ‘defund the police’ and BLM rhetoric that thrilled in 2020 has become a political albatross.
I n the early summer of 2020, Americans emerged from lockdown starved for social contact, commonality, and purpose. They were provided relief when the arrest-related murder of George Floyd ignited a social movement, and some of the most aggressive enforcers of the Covid-lockdown, social-isolation regime inexplicably endorsed joining that mass movement in the streets. What followed was a campaign of occasionally violent revolutionary agitation, in the name of Black Lives Matter. In that year, the “anti-racist” ideology that drew its strength from that movement made a variety of demands on Democratic lawmakers; those elected officials often consented to the demands. Today, they’re still paying for that lapse in judgment.
For example, California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, signed a bill in September 2020 creating a commission composed of “a colloquium of scholars” to study the prospect of paying reparations to California’s black residents. Newsom contended at the time that Donald Trump’s presence in the Oval Office forced his hand. But he endorsed the measure because BLM activists demanded it, and he believed that his political prospects depended on their support. This week, the bill for Newsom’s acquiescence came due.
In its final recommendations, the California Reparations Task Force advocated direct cash payments (no grants or credits) to every black resident of California as compensation for a variety of alleged racism-related harms. Offenses for which African-American residents can seek restitution include housing discrimination, “over-policing and mass incarceration,” disparate health outcomes, and a variety of other manifestations of racial prejudice, both real and debatable. The task force imagined that little scrutiny would be applied to potential applicants for remuneration. Theoretically, the payouts could amount to well over $1 million apiece for some applicants, and satisfying the task force’s deeply unpopular demands might cost the state more than twice its total annual operating budget. It’s hardly surprising that the commission’s unrealistic proposals rapidly dampened Newsom’s enthusiasm for the project.
“Many of the recommendations put forward by the task force are critical action items we’ve already been hard at work addressing,” the governor contended. He insisted that his administration has already committed “billions” to “improve equity” and strengthen “economic mobility.” But comprehensively addressing the legacy of American racism “is about more than just cash payments.” That’s a diplomatic way of telling the task force to sod off.
That is, of course, a prudent approach to the political conundrum engineered by California’s reparations task force, but it’s one Newsom should have seen coming even in the dense ideological haze that settled over Democratic politics in 2020. The governor wasn’t lost in that fog alone. Many Democrats succumbed to the exhortations of the BLM/defund movement that overtook their party in 2020. They’re still paying the price for it.
After the November 2020 elections, in which voters appeared to surgically excise Donald Trump’s administration while leaving much of the elected GOP intact, some Democratic lawmakers convinced themselves that the movement to “defund” police departments had become a political albatross. Since then, a cottage industry has sprouted up to broadcast the notion that no one ever wanted to defund American police departments, much less attempted to make good on the promise. But the defund movement did, in fact, more than just talk.
Tens of major metropolitan areas and many smaller municipalities “cut funding from police department budgets or decreased officer numbers” in response to the goading of the activist class. The results of that experiment are in. Crime rates are up. Police morale is down. A manpower crisis among the nation’s police departments that predates the defund movement has been exacerbated by it. Democratic politicians are relentlessly dogged, even today, by the charge that they may have once glanced favorably in the general direction of the defund movement.
The activists and their allies in the press have tried to rebrand “defund” to mean anything other than the word’s literal definition. But even “in places where civilian and police leaders want to add more officers, they are struggling to hire, in effect achieving activists’ goal of smaller forces,” the Atlantic’s David Graham wrote this week. The defund movement is a surmountable obstacle in the bluest of American municipalities: Chicago’s far-left mayoral candidate, who had pushed to move funds from police to social services, won election this year despite Chicago’s spiraling crime rate. But the controversial vision for the future of American policing still consumes Democratic primary campaigns and is a liability for Democrats in competitive general elections.
The internecine debate within the Democratic coalition spawned by the revolutionary fever that overtook the party in 2020 has even inspired its own version of the Bolshevik schism. On the one hand, there are the Trotskyite permanent revolutionaries (the “lumpers”), for whom the movement’s goal must be a “sustained and comprehensive overhaul” of every American institution, public and private, to expunge the vestigial racism that lurks beneath its surface. On the other, there are the Bukharinites (the “splitters”) who prefer to see their movement focus on discrete issues and establish anti-racist models that may one day be applied to a broader array of imperfect institutions. The two sects align only in their mutual hostility and in their agreement about the pervasive racism that continues to exert its unperceived influence over every aspect of American life.
These divides are papered over by the presence of an ostensibly centrist Democrat in the Oval Office who, nevertheless, is presiding over the rapid extinction of Democratic centrists. Joe Biden’s grandfatherly mien is betrayed by his administration’s radical efforts to subvert the Constitution’s equal-protection clause to advantage black constituencies over other races. His party’s commitment to equality is called into question when Democrat-led cities provision only “mothers of color” with income subsidies, and major metropolitan mayors make a virtue of discrimination against white professionals. The temptation within the Democratic Party is to continue the revolution that began in 2020, even at the risk of alienating voters for whom “colorblindness” is not a dirty word.
The political instincts displayed by prominent Democrats suggests they are aware that their deference toward the activist class and its unrealistic demands is a liability. But the animal spirits unleashed in 2020 have not been pacified by being ushered into the Democratic tent. After Joe Biden, the flood.